State of the Modern Music Industry and the Future of Music Preservation
Since the turn of the Millennium, the music industry has seen radical changes in how its product is produced, sold, distributed and consumed (with more changes on the way thanks to a bill signed by President Trump last week). Arguably the biggest revolution in recent years has been the rise of music streaming, with streaming revenues soaring from .1 billion dollars in 2005 to 6.6 billion dollars in 2017. Streaming helped reverse the 15 year downward trend in revenue the industry faced from 1999 to 2014, and has helped oversee regrowth of over 3 billion dollars since 2014 (also in part by being a more convenient alternative to piracy). Of course, I doubt music streaming would have the success it has now had digital music sales not warmed consumers up to the idea of getting their music from something other than a CD, cassette tape or record.
Digital music is now on its way out, but it’s a smooth baton pass to a new front-runner. Had consumers been pressured directly from ownable, touchable music to paying for access to files you don’t get to call your own, I highly doubt streaming would be the leading source of industry income it is today.
Surprisingly (to me at least), radio is still alive and kicking, with 91 percent of Americans still listening to radio. With further consideration, this makes lots of sense, seeing as virtually every automobile sold in the U.S. comes standard with a radio able to connect to AM and FM stations for no fee. No fiddling with cassettes, disks or iPods to get a curated playlist of popular music at no cost makes radio ideal for the 75% of Americans who typically listen to music in their cars.
In a sense, streaming (especially free, non premium streaming) is just a more advanced radio. Both are transmissions of music not owned by the consumer and selected by someone other than the listener. This does make me worry somewhat about the future of music preservation. With less people owning their own music, we may start to see songs, albums, and even entire discographies vanish like digital-download-only video games like Flappy Bird and P.T., which were at least playable for those who had them downloaded locally. It’s like having your favorite T.V. show pulled off Netflix, but 10 times as frustrating. If the market sees an extinction of personally ownable music, or an album were ever to be released to be streamed only, if that album were to be removed by its creators or the stream providers, the only ways these works could ever be listened to again would be illegal. One would have to illegally re-record a stream as a local audio file and redistribute it illegally physically or digitally; or steal the master copy from the artist or record label, which is, again, illegal.
I highly recommend owning your favorite music either digitally or physically in case of a prolonged internet outage or in case it gets removed from streaming services like 2 tracks, “White Is Right” and “Dog Festival Directions” (songs criticizing racism and the infamous Yulin dog meat festival, respectively) on Pink Guy (aka Filthy Frank aka Joji Miller)’s raunchy 2017 album Pink Season did. I consider myself lucky I bought the album upon its initial release, and I hope it does not become a precedent for future music that may be boundary pushing and uncomfortable.
